ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO this spring, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West
Show set out from Omaha, Nebraska on its annual tour of the United
States. Cody's private train was packed with 500 performers,
stage hands and musicians. The show stopped in cities across
the Midwest and the East Coast. Audiences watched thrilling displays
of trick riding and sharp-shooting, and the entire show was set
to inspiring music by Buffalo Bill's cowboy band. Now, a college
professor from Wyoming has created a compact disc that ­ for the
first time in a hundred years ­ resurrects the music of the cowboy
band.

Stephen Smith: Day after day, show after show, Buffalo Bill galloped into
the arena on his steed accompanied by a familiar tune by George
Frederick Handel called "See, the conquering hero comes."

(Handel Music rolls)

Now hang on. Is Baroque music the right soundtrack for a cowboy?

(Music up full)

Perhaps Baroque is OK when "improved" by snare drums
and cymbals and is played by cowboys. Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild
West Show swelled with this stirring, patriotic music. The act
debuted in 1883 and toured for three decades, capitalizing on
America's romantic ideal of its freshly-tamed western frontier.
And to audiences, Cody was more than a windblown guy who got
his nickname shooting the American bison to near-extinction.
According to historian Paul Fees, Cody was America's ideal man:
a courtly, chivalrous, self-made fellow who could shoot a gun
and charm a crowd.

Paul Fees: In Europe he was called "Nature's Nobleman" because
he was someone who had grown up on the frontier yet represented
all of those best aspects of civilization.

SS: Acts such as Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull were set to music
by the 21 piece Cowboy Band. Each musician wore a wide-brimmed
hat and studded gun holster though few if any of the players
had ever punched cattle, much less shot a bad guy. Music Professor
Mike Masterson of Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming studied
the cowboy band and its music.

Mike Masterson: My great-grandmother in 1896 when she was 14 years old saw
the Wild West Show in Marion, Indiana. She talked about it the
rest of her life. She died when she was 93 years old.

SS: In grandma's day, Cody was the kind of western icon that John
Wayne is today and brass bands were equivalent to today's pop
radio.

MM: Every one would have cared about bands a hundred years ago.
There were popular songs of course and you could buy sheet music
but there really weren't recordings. And so the traveling bands
and community bands a hundred years ago brought the popular songs
to the small towns and the large cities of America.

SS: Masterson lives near Buffalo Bill's namesake town of Cody,
Wyoming. He studied the Cowboy Band for ten years, wanting to
compile a program of Wild West sheet music for contemporary brass
bands. But the show's original tune book had vanished.

MM: so what I did is start with looking at old programs
and seeing what tunes were mentioned there and then looking bat
newspaper articles.. And fortunately the reporters would often
write down the pieces that were played during parts of the show.

SS: Masterson rifled historical collections from the Library of
Congress in Washington to the Circus World Museum in Baraboo,
Wisconsin. He hired the Americus Brass Band, a nationally-known
ensemble that plays in authentic period style to make an 18-track
CD of Cowboy Band tunes. Historians say the Wild West show helped
engrave a sentimental, heroic picture of the west into America's
culture memory. The music left its own legacies.

(Music: Star Spangled Banner)

SS: Masterson says, for example, that the Wild West Show helped
spread a popular song of the time called the Star Spangled Banner
and the future use of that tune at big public events like baseball
games.

MM: Buffalo Bill, for over 30 years, opened every show with the
Star Spangled Banner. John Phillip Sousa also would begin to use
that piece. And so with several bands out there traveling around,
they really set the standard. Finally, when the Star Spangled
Banner became national anthem in 1931, you can attribute it these
touring acts like the Wild West Show for establishing the practice.

SS: The Cowboy Band played popular songs and tunes composed exclusively
for the Wild West Show. One original was "The Passing of
the Red Man." It probably helped create that caricature
of Indian music that thumped through so many Hollywood westerns
a generation later.

(Music: "Passing of the Red Man")

SS: In the 1890s, The Wild West show and it's Cowboy Band toured
Europe and were a smash hit, performing for royalty and commoners
alike. Historian Paul Fees of the Buffalo Bill Center says the
band made music which evoked the sturdy, clever, and virtuous
character of the American frontiersman. And, the band had great
chops.

PF: By all accounts the cowboy band was really tight, really disciplined,
a band with incredible stamina, even in Europe where military
bands were all the rage in the 19th and early 20th
centuries.

SS: The Wild West Show went bankrupt in 1913. What had been celebrated
as an authentic slice of the old west grew to be seen as a threadbare,
mawkish carnival. A show filled with live elk and buffalo, with
Indian teepees and bronco bucks, no longer appealed to Americans.

PF: Indians were safely on the reservations, the Indian wars were
long gone, and finally the whole nature of the outdoor show business
was changing. At the time The Wild West Show got started in 1880,
the outdoor show, the circus, the wild west show, the dog and
pony show were in their hey day. It was the golden age of the
circus. By 1913 those things were giving way to baseball games
and football games.

SS: Bill Cody died four years after the show folded. Now, 80
years after that, this new CD based on the Cowboy Band's music
revives the sense of genuine enthusiasm and old west hokum that
fueled Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

MUSICAL SELECTIONS

From the compact disc "Wild West Music of Buffalo Bill's Cowboy Band," selected by Music Professor
Mike Masterson of Northwest College, Powell, Wyoming, and performed by the Americus Brass Band.